IoT budgets booming, says Vodafone

Organisations that have adopted the Internet of Things (IoT) are now spending 24 percent of their IT budget on IoT related projects, a figure comparable to the amount spent on each of cloud and hosting, analytics and mobility, according to the Vodafone IoT Barometer 2016.

Interest in IoT is at an all-time high, Vodafone says. “Twenty eight percent of businesses already have live projects, with a further 35 percent less than a year away from launch. … Seventy six percent of businesses say that IoT will be ‘critical’ to future success, and 63 percent expect to have live projects within the next year. … Sixty three percent are seeing ‘significant’ return on investment, up from 59 percent in 2015. …. Forty eight percent of adopters say they’re using IoT to support large-scale business transformation and 29 percent say they’re using it to connect multiple organisations into ecosystems.”

Vodafone said the responses showed a clear link between how much of the total enterprise IT budget was allocated to IoT and the results produced. “At one extreme there are those businesses that allocate more than 40 percent of their IT budgets to IoT. Seventy nine percent of them say they have seen ‘significant’ return on investment. On the other hand, those that allocate less than 10 percent of their IT budgets to IoT still see good results, but only 45 percent of them say the results are ‘significant’.”

To compile the barometer, Vodafone says it interviewed more than 1,000 “qualified respondents” in organisations ranging in size from SMEs to the largest multinationals in 17 countries, including Australia. Respondents represented retail, manufacturing, energy and utilities, healthcare, transport and logistics, automotive, consumer electronics, and industrials. For the first time Vodafone also surveyed public sector organisations.

This is the fourth annual edition of the barometer and in his introduction Erik Brenneis, director, internet of things, Vodafone Global Enterprise, says: “In 2015’s report we started exploring these best practices through our Sophistication Index, which proved to be one of the most popular elements of the Barometer. This year we’ve gone further: right across the report we’ve looked in much more detail at exactly which approaches businesses are taking in their IoT projects, and which aspects have the biggest impact on return on investment (RoI).

Some of its main findings were

– Most adopters have clear goals, but the top performers are those that treat their IoT initiatives as business projects instead of IT purchases.

– Adopters see that IoT applications are a gold mine of data, and are focused on getting that data to the people and applications that need it.

– Security and privacy can’t be ignored. Most adopters are cautiously optimistic, working with their IoT providers to control the risk.